Hello,
I agree with Mike's viewpoint: the report seems to be prewritten, and not based on actual discussions about the forum.
Please provide excerpts of the report that make you think this.
Nevertheless, even if the summary was good, which is doubtful, the data presented in the discussion (
https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/ms-forum-community-review-report/1436/6)
is confusing, and I would like to have a clarification. First of all, the axis isn't to scale, you are presenting three different monthly usages in percent but some of them are not adding 100%. I think I'm missing something in these graphs, because they should
add up. Furthermore, presenting it as a percent makes the things confusing: there's actually more than 10x people participating in Meta, but the graph doesn't suggest this. The only world region where it seems to be more interactions via Forum than via Meta
is in Sub-saharan Africa. But this is a percent, not a grand total. Around 12,5% of the Meta Users are from this region and around 22,5% of the Forum users. But 12,5% of the Meta users is 575 users, and 22,5% of MS forums is 33 people. Is to say, there are
more than 17 times more users from Sub-saharan Africa using Meta than MS Forums. The graph is misleading also in this point, not only in the percent not adding up.
It's obvious that the number of users is way higher for Meta than the Forum. Having more users than Meta is not a goal of the Forum. We are sharing the numbers there only to better understand the percentages shown.
The point of these metrics is to compare the regional location of Forum users vs the regional location of Meta users. The hypothesis is that the MS Forum can be especially useful for users outside of Northern & Western Europe and North America.
The percentages show the distribution of users by region on Meta and on the Forum. ~18% for the ESEAP blue line means that in that month ~18% of Meta users were located in that region. The red line means the % of Forum users in that month without counting Foundation staff. The yellow line includes Foundation staff as well (as the number of Forum participants grows, the influence of Foundation staff should become irrelevant, as in Meta).
This is the first time we produce these metrics. Comparing Meta with the MS Forum is complex for many reasons. Meta covers way more than Movement Strategy and discussions happen (with some exceptions) in the Talk namespace. We could explore a smaller subset of Meta pages getting closer to the MS Forum scope. Again, the goal being to check regional distribution of users, not "Meta vs Forum". Still, we thought it was useful to start recording this data and sharing it.
We will include these metrics in our monthly reports. Over time we will see whether we can learn anything comparing the regional distribution of Meta and Forum users.
Then there are some interesting points about engagement. Is clearly going down. Is there any reflection on this? We don't have data on Meta engagement, so a comparison is difficult,
When a new space is announced, it is expected to receive a first bump of activity. After that comes the actual curve of consolidation (or not) of this new space. Two other factors influence in this case:
- Many users responded to the community review call, joined, tested, maybe engaged a bit, and then left back to their routines, waiting for the outcome of the review period.
- After mid June, Wikimedia activity enters a seasonal reduction of activity that can be especially felt in global conversations.
We will see how the trends look for August-October, after the review period has ended and in the context of a more active season.
About Meta, there is this:
Active editors on Meta in non content pages. One can see that May-July has lower numbers than January-April. Maybe a seasonal effect? We will see in the upcoming months.
There is also
All Time active editors in non content pages, and in
all pages. It took a couple of years for the new platform to consolidate and start growing month after month. Just to put things into perspective.
but the data provided to defend that this forum is thriving is just saying
the opposite.
That's because we don't provide the data to defend anything, but to allow everyone to check how the Forum is doing. Your critique based on that data proves this point.
If possible, I would like to have some clarifications on this data.
Thanks
Galder